Three misconfigured AWS S3 buckets have been discovered wide open on the public internet containing “dozens of terabytes” of social media posts and similar pages – all scraped from around the world by the US military to identify and profile persons of interest.

The archives were found by UpGuard’s veteran security-breach hunter Chris Vickery during a routine scan of open Amazon-hosted data silos, and the trio weren’t exactly hidden. The buckets were named centcom-backup, centcom-archive, and pacom-archive.

CENTCOM is the common abbreviation for the US Central Command, which controls army operations in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. PACOM is the name for US Pacific Command, covering the rest of southern Asia, China and Australasia.

Vickery told The Register today he stumbled upon them by accident while running a scan for the word “COM” in publicly accessible S3 buckets. After refining his search, the CENTCOM archive popped up, and at first he thought it was related to Chinese multinational Tencent, but quickly realized it was a US military archive of astounding size.

“For the research I downloaded 400GB of samples but there were many terabytes of data up there,” he said. “It’s mainly compressed text files that can expand out by a factor of ten so there’s dozens and dozens of terabytes out there and that’s a conservative estimate.”

I’m curious to know if anyone else found these buckets before, I should hope being the US Military they at least have access logging turned on for these buckets, but considering the fact they were open to World – that may not be the case.

It just goes to show (as with MongoDB) you can’t trust people with lax defaults because most of the time developers wont change them.

Just one of the buckets contained 1.8 billion social media posts automatically fetched over the past eight years up to today. It mainly contains postings made in central Asia, however Vickery noted that some of the material is taken from comments made by American citizens.

The databases also reveal some interesting clues as to what this information is being used for. Documents make reference to the fact that the archive was collected as part of the US government’s Outpost program, which is a social media monitoring and influencing campaign designed to target overseas youths and steer them away from terrorism.

Vickery found the Outpost development configuration files in the archive, as well as Apache Lucene indexes of keywords designed to be used with the open-source search engine Elasticsearch. Another file refers to Coral, which may well be a reference to the US military’s Coral Reef data-mining program.

“Coral Reef is a way to analyze a major data source to provide the analyst the ability to mine significant amounts of data and provide suggestive associations between individuals to build out that social network,” Mark Kitz, technical director for the Army Distributed Common Ground System – Army, told the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association magazine Signal back in 2012.

“Previously, we would mine through those intelligence reports or whatever data would be available, and that would be very manual-intensive.”

I guess tools like this are just making it easier to find exposed buckets:

There is definitely going to be more of these cases popping up and more people jump on the cloud bandwagon without really understanding the security implications, “Hey the URL is not public so we don’t need to protect it because no one can find it” – etc.